SOME DRAMATIC CLASHES OVER OWNERSHIP

A look at some landmark disputes over artistic ownership:

• After the musical “Rent,” pictured above, (directed by former UCSD grad and former La Jolla Playhouse artistic chief Michael Greif) became a hit, a dramaturge named Lynn Thomson sued the late writer-composer Jonathan Larson’s estate, saying she actually co-wrote and developed much of the material. The two sides reached a settlement in 1998.

• In a case with major implications for the idea of a “director’s copyright,” the director Joe Mantello sued over a Florida production of the Terrence McNally play “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” saying it copied the blocking and other interpretive work from his 1995 Broadway staging of the play. Mantello eventually settled, but a judge’s earlier ruling supported the director’s copyright claim.

• How small a fragment of a creative work can be legally protected? The English postpunk band Wire raised this question when it sued the act Elastica for cadging a four-note guitar riff from the Wire song “Three Girl Rhumba” for the 1995 track “Connection.” (The two bands settled.)

• And how does the mode of expression change the rules? In the early 2000s, DVD manufacturers sued to halt the distribution of a software code known as DeCSS, which potentially could be used to override DVD copy protection. Protesters responded by symbolically distributing the code through such modes as haiku poetry and T-shirts.

— JAMES HEBERT

Neil Patrick Harris (Mark) and Christian Mena (his best-friend, Roger) sing about how to pay the “Rent.” — John Johnson

+Read Caption

Neil Patrick Harris (Mark) and Christian Mena (his best-friend, Roger) sing about how to pay the “Rent.”
/ John Johnson

Two theater artists sit down to write a musical titled “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” It’s said to be based on an obscure British novel published more than 100 years ago and titled “Israel Rank.”

So what can all this have to do with a classic 1949 movie called “Kind Hearts and Coronets”? At this point, maybe more than the musical’s creative team would care to contemplate.

“A Gentleman’s Guide,” by writer Robert L. Freedman and composer Steven Lutvak, was to have had its world premiere this fall at La Jolla Playhouse as the third show in the theater’s 2010-11 season. But now the Playhouse has postponed the project indefinitely, as the creators deal with issues of artistic ownership.

The sticking point is that “Kind Hearts and Coronets” is also based on “Israel Rank.” And those who own the rights to the film apparently are arguing that the musical borrows from the movie as well as the book.

“We were notified by the authors that they were being questioned about the source material,” says Michael S. Rosenberg, the Playhouse’s managing director. “The copyright holders on the film were saying, no, you based this on the film.

“It’s sort of the great thing about our country, that anybody can sue anybody for any reason, at any time. We agree with the creative team that this was based on the underlying novel, that it’s not based on the film.”

It’s not exactly the first time a dispute has ignited over the DNA of an artistic adaptation. Rap stars have been sued for sampling classic recordings; authors have been taken to court for piggybacking on books by J.D. Salinger, Margaret Mitchell and J.K. Rowling; recently, the guerrilla artist (and ex-San Diegan) Shepard Fairey got into a legal tussle with The Associated Press after he used an AP photo as the basis for his ubiquitous painting of President Obama.

But because plays — and especially musicals — bring together so many disparate artistic elements, from story to song to (often) choreography and other interpretive techniques, they seem especially susceptible to competing claims on their creation.

“Theater is a very collaborative art form,” as Rosenberg says. “And so when you’re developing something new and you’re in a rehearsal room — who owns that stuff?”

In times past, when copyrights were less rigorously enforced and attitudes about artistic license were perhaps more relaxed, “borrowing” of all sorts was tolerated. It’s well known that Shakespeare, for example, appropriated plots and scenarios from earlier works for many of his plays.

Fast-forward 400 years to our time, when not only playwrights but even directors and other theater artists scramble to copyright their work. So, with some irony, comes a work like “Shakespeare’s R&J,” a 1998 re-imagining of “Romeo and Juliet” by the director and adapter Joe Colarco.

The words in that play are almost entirely Shakespeare’s (whose works have been in the public domain for centuries), but Colarco copyrighted the piece in his own name because it uses a specific framing device and unique aspects of staging.

When it comes to plays derived from movies, rights-holders behind the films also have become much more savvy about the economic prospects of a stage adaptation.

“Twenty years ago, an independent (theater) producer could go to a movie studio and get the rights to a film fairly easily and reasonably,” says Ralph Sevush, an executive director of the Dramatists Guild, which advocates for playwrights.

“That doesn’t happen anymore because the studios are aware of the value of those properties. It just never was on their radar before.”

Such vigilance, along with the subjective nature of judging how a story has been adapted or derived, can make putting together a production based on a movie or other established work very complicated. Rosenberg uses the fictional example of a musical that takes the movie “Star Wars” as inspiration.

“So then you get into, is (so and so playwright’s) ‘Star Wars’ based on George Lucas’ ‘Star Wars’? Or is it based on the story of Moses, which is in the public domain?”

It so happens that “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” also revolves around a character who discovers he has royal blood — emphasis on the “blood.”

As Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley described the piece when announcing the new season in January, the musical is about a man who learns he’s a half-dozen or so spots back in line for a royal title, “and decides he’s going to knock off anybody in his way.”

Tony-winner Jefferson Mays (“I Am My Own Wife”) was to play all the victims of the murderously ambitious character. Darko Tresnjak, who served as resident artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre until last year, was to direct.

“Israel Rank” — the Roy Horniman book that Freedman and Lutvak maintain their show is based on — was known until recently for being very hard to find.

The British journalist Simon Heffer has written that he searched for 10 years before finding a secondhand copy of Horniman’s novel in 1982. For the next quarter-century, he was not able to locate even one other copy. But in September 2008, a company named Faber Finds used the Horniman family’s one remaining volume to begin selling an Internet print-on-demand version. (Tresnjak received his copy from the musical’s creative team around the same time.)

Published in 1907, the book is presented as the memoirs of the title character, who sits in prison after being convicted of murder. Writing in the British magazine Spectator, Heffer calls it “a superb thriller” that “deserves to be a very famous and celebrated book.”

But the novel also has been interpreted as being anti-Semitic (Rank is half-Jewish), and while Heffer and others argue that it actually satirizes bias against Jews, that reputation may be one reason it fell into obscurity.

The 1949 movie, by contrast, is a major classic, residing on numerous lists of all-time best films and readily available on DVD.

In the movie, Alec Guinness plays all the murder victims, similar to descriptions of the musical. (Such a notion obviously isn’t relevant to a novel.)

Heffer writes that all the murders in the book are “carried out without a trace of humor” — in fact, one of the victims is a baby who is deliberately infected with scarlet fever. That tone is a contrast to the movie, as well as Playhouse descriptions of the musical. In the film and musical, Israel also has two love interests. In the novel, there are three.

Tresnjak, who spent about 18 months working on “A Gentleman’s Guide” (he says Freedman and Lutvak have been developing it for some seven years), does mostly classical work so had never encountered a rights situation like this one. His understanding is that the pair originally planned to base the musical on the film, but that there was an eventual parting of the ways with the rights-holders, “and now it’s based, as far as Steven and Robert are concerned, on the book.”

He adds that “for me personally, it’s an exquisite piece. There are people who’ve said they think it’s the best score since (Stephen Sondheim’s) ‘A Little Night Music.’ ”

Freedman and Lutvak said they were not able to comment on the matter right now.

The Playhouse’s Ashley makes the argument that similarities between book and musical don’t necessarily mean a copyright has been violated, because “ideas are not copyrightable, it’s the expressions of those ideas that is.”

Ashley uses the example of directing a new production: “You can’t actually copyright the ideas of the direction,” he says. “All you can copyright is the staging itself. You can’t copyright, ‘My production takes place on Mars.’ That’s an uncopyrightable idea because it is an idea. But you can copyright the actuality of a Martian crater, stage left, right by the door.”

Regardless of whether the creators of “A Gentleman’s Guide” thought there was any chance their work would be perceived as deriving from the movie, though, Sevush from the Dramatists Guild says caution is always warranted.

As he puts it, “You have to assume that if there’s been a movie made based on something, there’s at least going to be a claim. So most producers are careful enough to assure themselves, to have all those deals lined up before doing the show. Producers or writers who go forward without having a clear chain of title do so at their own risk.”

Sevush adds that “those situations are very rare these days, where shows run into trouble with rights-holders.” That’s because potential conflicts normally are addressed “before anyone spends time and energy writing the thing.”

Rosenberg says the Playhouse decided to postpone the project until the ownership issues are sorted out because the theater wasn’t ready to take a risk of forging ahead, given the uncertainty, “even though the authors have indemnified us.”

Still, he says, “we have every reason to believe it’ll be resolved relatively quickly. The nice thing about all this is, it really is in everyone’s best interest to make it work.”